"Six Parties, Zero Progress"

...If Pyongyang proliferated, it is time to once again sanction, squeeze, isolate, and perhaps even quarantine it...

...And China is taking military and economic measures of its own to live with or perhaps even control an unstable, nuclear regime on its borders...

...The real state of play, then, is that North Korea will not fully declare, much less disable or dismantle, its nuclear weapons programs, and it has continued to proliferate...

...In short, no amount of evidence of North Korea’s bad intentions will deter the Bush administration from declaring diplomatic victory...

...Second, the Bush administration should tell the truth about North Korea’s proliferation...

...protection, is showing a keener interest in having its own military capabilities to defend against North Korean missiles...

...After North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear tests in 2006, the administration got tough, with two strong U.N...

...McConnell further assessed that Pyongyang has produced enough plutonium for up to half a dozen nuclear weapons, and has the ballistic missile capability to hit the continental United States with those weapons...

...All Hill had to say to Congress on this matter was that the State Department takes the issue of North Korean proliferation seriously—diplomatic talk meaning we’re not planning to do anything about it...

...It was just a year and a half ago that Bush told an audience in Singapore that we would “hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such actions” if it shared WMD technology...

...Just the day before, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell testifi ed that the intelligence community has “moderate confi dence”— intelligence speak for “we have evidence”— that North Korea has an ongoing uranium enrichment program...

...policy will change North Korea’s nuclear status...

...Last week, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Christopher Hill, State’s top Asia diplomat, had to explain away the fact that Pyongyang has missed its deadline for fully declaring all of its nuclear weapons programs...

...South Korea’s new president, Lee Myungbak, seems willing to be less conciliatory to Kim Jong Il and repair relations with Japan and Washington...

...There is little prospect that current U.S...

...The Six Party Talks, supposedly a model of multilateral diplomacy, have thus caused each party to act more unilaterally...

...All three parties should ramp up efforts to take in the refugees still pouring out of North Korea...

...Assistant Secretary Hill got it exactly backwards when he told senators on February 6 that “we” have much work to do in getting Pyongyang to rid itself of its nuclear programs...

...Security Council resolutions, Six Party Talk agreements, and U.S...

...President Bush then decided to give the regime he loathes one last chance to come clean, after decades of lying and cheating...

...If Pyongyang was not helping Syria with a WMD program, then the administration should say so forthrightly to help save its faltering policy...

...Third, the administration should focus its time and energy on building a common approach with South Korea and Japan...

...Beijing, too, has little faith in the talks and has drawn up military plans to intervene in North Korea to protect its own interests...

...The situation is, in short, more precarious than when this new round of diplomacy began...

...But it seems pretty clear that when Israel struck a site in Syria in September 2007, it was because North Korea was helping ramp up a Syrian WMD program of some sort...

...But no amount of spin can hide the fact that whoever becomes president in 2009 will face a North Korean problem worse than that which Bill Clinton bequeathed to George W. Bush...

...Washington shares with its democratic allies an interest in a democratic, unifi ed peninsula...

...President Bush, who has shown a remarkable steadfastness on Iraq, keen not to bequeath a Middle East disaster to his successor, still has an opportunity to change course in Korea...

...He can’t take a tougher line if Washington sticks to its “agreement at any price” course...

...China’s trade with the North tripled between 2000 and 2005—with an eye toward gaining more infl uence over the future disposition of the peninsula...

...South Korea has little interest in seeing a Chinese satellite state to its north...

...The burden is on Pyongyang to come clean...

...All parties are concerned about China’s intentions, which they are keeping to themselves...

...To mask this noncompliance, the State Department will talk optimistically of the next phases of diplomacy, continuing to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil, removing it from the list of state sponsors of terror, even negotiating a peace treaty and full normalization...

...All three countries should thus reestablish a strong deterrent posture that will be necessary as they work toward the only real, albeit long term, solution: a unifi ed Korea free of Kim Jong Il and his ilk...

...What’s more, China is making its own plans and arrangements to deal with an unstable and nuclear North Korea...

...U.N...

...This policy collapse on North Korea has happened at a rapid clip...

...Washington is essentially conducting its own negotiations with Pyongyang...

...Then there is the subject of proliferation...

...Japan, a little less confi dent of U.S...

...Rather than tying the hands of the next president, President Bush could start taking a more realistic approach to North Korea...

...BY DAN BLUMENTHAL The State Department is engaged in heavy-duty spin to keep alive the clearly failing Six Party Talks on North Korean disarmament...

...First, Washington can halt its economic largesse until North Korea makes a full, and verifi able, declaration of its nuclear programs...

...Any talk of de-listing North Korea as a terrorist state or of normalizing relations is inappropriate given North Korea’s continued bad behavior...

...But Lee is getting mixed messages from Washington...

...We,” meaning Washington (plus Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow), must verify that they have done so and punish them if they have not...

...Besides creating a more dangerous Korean peninsula, the Six Party process has caused a breach with our most important ally, Japan, which wanted to take a tougher line...

...In short, notwithstanding State Department spin, North Korea has nuclear weapons and the ability to use them against the United States and her allies...

...If North Korea does collapse, American, Japanese, and South Korean war planners will have to consider the possibility of dealing with a unilateral Chinese intervention...

...The prospect of real change in North Korea under Kim is next to zero...

...Even more diffi cult was fudging the very open question of continuing North Korean proliferation...

...resolutions and financial sanctions that hurt Kim and his cronies directly...

...warnings are supposed to prevent Pyongyang from proliferating any weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missile technology...